


Lake of Sand

by antumbral



Category: Swan Lake (Bourne)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:37:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antumbral/pseuds/antumbral
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, there was a swan who dreamed he was a man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lake of Sand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Signe (oxoniensis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxoniensis/gifts).



Unwaning sun has bleached the sand to a blazing ash-grey, stretched out from horizon to horizon in a flatland so vast that the only shadow in sight is his own. Siegfried Hohenzollern stands at the center of an immense desert and stares into the distance, vision wavering with heatwaves and fuzzy at the edges where the wind wafts the sand into the air.

He is alone, white sand below, sky above an unearthly deep blue by comparison. He does not know what he is looking for. There is no sound.

On the horizon, objects come into view, dark at first while they linger in the distortion of the heatwaves, but soon appearing white as well: they are birds, flying overhead in precise formation. Swans, he can see them now -- a single bird in the lead and others following behind, their movements as choreographed as a drill team, graceful. They fly soundlessly overhead and he turns with their passage, shielding his eyes to look up -- bleached white bellies and powerful wings above, swirling white sand below. A trick of the torrid horizon turns their bodies dark again as they retreat into the distance, until they are no longer swans but shapes that might be anything: planes, humvees, soldiers. They disappear.

Siegfried is alone again, one man beneath the sun. The fine bone-colored dust in the air frosts his eyebrows, settles in the rough weave of his shirt, the pockets of his pants. All he can hear is the wind.

He wakes.

*

Unwaning florescent lights have bleached the contents of his lower desk drawer to paperclips and bands. Before the lights, the desk was a place of wonder: green or gold paperclips strung together into belts worn by superheroes. Rubber bands piled into a ball that was remarkable for its size, black ink pens dumped into open drawers for safekeeping, but now the power of the lights make the contents of the desk appear smaller and mundane. Siegfried withdraws one of the pens and screws on the cap: they are all making do, these days.

These days, there is no beauty in the work that they do. Once, they were code-breakers, and could find loveliness in the equations that they drew up between themselves to explain communication. Now, the equations only speak to a pared-down paper result, and Siegfried feels inexplicably that he is one of the few left behind, lingering in the space of memory that the numbers have spared, the grids and squares of possibility that he cannot explain or draw. He is forgotten in the wake of those numbers, but he will continue deciphering them for as long as the war effort demands.

*

Unwavering sun grasps at the color of the sand, tugs at it until the sand is pale white and the sun nourishes itself to wheat-gold. There is a beach here, a confluence of water and land in a space that the sun cannot contain. There are blue waves here, and white dunes.

The scorpions have all adapted to the lack of color in the sun, and their segmented bodies have no pigment besides the bleached wheat-gold of the sand. Some of them are completely transparent. There is a folktale that says the most colorless creatures are the most dangerous, but in the case of the scorpions it is not true. The most dangerous of the scorpions is a dark chocolate color, visible separate from the sand. This scorpion rises above the rest of the desert, creeping in on fragile legs.

Siegfried stands alone with no shadow, his presence casting no reflection on the glowing sand. A crab mars the outline of the seeming that he throws: carves its own pepper-footed trail and passes over the path twice a day. Siegfried is unprepared for such tenacity in the face of time, and twice wipes the trail out with careless swipes of his foot before he realizes that the crab is tenacious and afterward respects the path. In turn, the crab respects his own footprints and the sea-birds hunting the crab stay out of his way.

Siegfried tries his wings against the plover in the surf, never wanting to be a bully, but finding himself born to the role nonetheless. Smaller birds run in his wake; waves and water part beneath his feet. Siegfried is a swan, his feathers white and well-groomed. The brackish water swirls around his rough feet and forms tidepools.

*

Swans are solitary creatures, but Siegfried finds himself unexpectedly with a mate. There is no explanation for how he knows that the other swan is his mate, but the feeling swells inexplicably in his breast until he cannot help but act on it: this fellow creature is _his_ , his mate, his to care for and live with and his to attend.

His mate's feathers fall out of pattern. It bothers Siegfried's innate sense of tidiness, so on the second day of their acquaintance he sidles up to the other swan, avoiding the nips of its beak with a handy ease that speaks of long practice, and takes a feather in his own beak, grooming. One by one, he smooths his mate's feathers into order, running his beak over the vanes to squeeze them into the proper position. Waves wash around their feet, carrying sand out to sea, but both swans remain still as Siegfried carefully selects feathers to clean, wiping the salt residue from long plumes, using his tongue to help knit together individual barbs and ease the passage of his beak. His mate is patient with this process, standing still while Siegfried tries to groom him into a state of better cleanliness.

After the plume feathers on the body are all finished, Siegfried finds himself smoothing neck feathers, tiny little feathers with a great deal of down near their base and a short expanse of vanes beyond that. He tries not to be rough, not to tug or pull too hard when each feather is sensitive and carefully conditioned to its purpose. His mate turns his head deferentially, bends to allow Siegfried better access and lips at Siegfried's own neck feathers, soothing him with reassuring motions and easy grooming around the base of his own neck. Siegfried smooths the feathers around his mate's eyes, ducks his head and curls his neck until he can reach the difficult places beneath his mate's throat. Grooming like this calms him, makes him feel secure and pleased with himself when his mate is presentable and well-fed, standing together in the surf and catching small sea-plants to eat.

*

The desk drawer is expanding, has become a desert or an ocean, endlessly deep and wide. Siegfried stares, tries to divine meanings in the spaces between rulers and cardstock. There are distracting chopsticks near the black pens, left over from when the office had Chinese takeout three weeks earlier. The chopsticks had gone well with his Kung Pao Chicken, but now lie incongruous and solitary in his drawer, held in place by the battered dividers that separate all the desk contents.

When Siegfried imagines that he is a swan, there are no dividers for the drawer; swans do not care for such things. When he is a swan, there is only open space, broad vistas. Here, his office has one window and three bars over that. The view looks out on a concrete courtyard with one bench, populated around lunchtime by his co-workers but most often empty. He can see a lone banana tree, small and sad in its planter in the center of the courtyard, casting a meager shadow that is not truly large enough to shade anyone. He dreams of enormous palm trees, curving beneficently towards the beach so that birds may roost beneath their shade.

*

When Siegfried-the-swan dreams of another life, he sometimes is a well-read man, standing alone in white pants, white braces, white undershirt. Siegfried-the-man looks a lot like a swan.

The man reaches up and touches his dark hair, uses dexterous fingers to put it into order. He shifts his shoulders, at ease with the confines of the braces, calm. Beside him is a mate, and Siegfried-the-man adjusts his mate's shirt, smooths his hair into the proper position. He tucks his mate's tags down and runs a finger down the bridge of his nose, teasing.

They are well-met, the man and his mate. They fit together well.

They stand in a lake of endless white sand, sand that extends so far it reaches up to touch the sky. The horizon wavers with the heat of the sand, never solid, never fixed, but the men do not turn away from its panoramic beauty. They know well the danger that the horizon represents.

Above them is a sky so blue that it might be a fiction, a dream. There is no promise in that sky, only lies that the men know enough to avoid. A flight of swans cruises overhead, disappears. They do not move, but the one man reaches out and takes the hand of the other, holding close. Holding tight.


End file.
